More Exes in Paris & Celebrity Books

Last week, Kate Hudson, Alex Rodriguez, and Cameron Diaz were in Paris at the same time. Click here for a refresher. This week it’s Hilary Duff, Joel Madden, and his wife Nicole Richie. Joel and Nicole were married just two months ago. Honeymoon? They hit up Colette – oh God I love Colette but real people cannot afford Colette – and then went for a romantic walk around Montmartre.

While it’s unclear the purpose of the trip for Nicole and Joel, Duff is in Paris to, um, promote her book Elixir. Now they call her a proper “author”. Well, Snooki’s an “author” now too, as is the aforementioned Nicole Richie so… I’m not sure the word carries the same meaning anymore. Duff may be an “author”, but is she a “writer”?

I posted an excerpt from Elixir a few months ago, and then I spent 10 minutes matching Duff’s cheese – here if you missed it. Now I’ve just found some more awesome lines from her debut novel. Posted below. See, the thing about writing is (and, um, I do want to write eventually but am a chicken sh-t), you’d think that what you eventually want to put out there is something only you could have written. In the best sense, what you write will be good and yours. But it’s very possible that it will be bad and yours. Even if it is bad though, it’s still YOUR bad. Like ONLY YOU could have written this bad thing.

One of the problems – and there are SO MANY – with what you’re about to read below is that it’s not just sh-t, it’s COMMON sh-t. Like, we didn’t need Hilary Duff to have produced it. You can find it on any fan fiction message board, text messages passed back and forth during class, something scribbled in the next 30 seconds… Go ahead, try it.

Ready?

Here’s an example of mine. It literally took me 45 seconds, because I had to backspace a few spelling errors:“There was a glint in his eye – more than mischief, more like mischief tinged with magic, and she knew that this would be a night she would not only not forget, but that would remain seared in her memory forever, for as long as he loved her, and she knew that would last longer than time.”

Now this, below, is Hilary Duff. And it got PUBLISHED. Encouraging or Discouraging? “His mane of dark, tousled hair, chiseled cheekbones, and thick eyebrows were stunning, but some inward pain twisted his eyes and mouth away from beauty and toward something more difficult and profound.” “His eyes drew me in, and what I saw there was raw and scarred…but it didn’t lie.”

“I saw an eternity of love in his eyes.”

“[H]e looked like a man who’d wrestled with life and won.”“I felt devastated inside, like the silent aftermath of a massive hurricane.”“It had been that way from the day we met—like he could see every place my heart was cracked and would pull open the wounds, inspect them, dig out every bit of infection, then fill them with his love until they healed.”